Splashup - Online Graphic Editor

I recently found Splashup, an online graphic editing tool. While I won’t be deleting my copy of Photoshop off of my hard drive quite yet, I was very impressed with the features available in the online graphic editor. Impressed enough that I would use them for doing quick and easy edits to images when I am on clients sites and do not have access to Photoshop.

Splashup offers the novice an easy to use tool for creating images for websites and because it uses flash there is nothing to download and install, just open the website and launch the editor. I was using it on my Ubuntu Linux desktop and I had no problem playing around and editing a photo of my kids from Halloween. Splashup Test

All I did to this was a simple crop, copy a layer, desaturate the one layer and erase the section I wanted in colour again. Nothing complicated, but Splashup did a fine job. I did it fairly quickly, but if I was not in a hurry I could have done a better job of erasing.

Once you are done editing or creating your image you can save the final result to your computer, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, or your Splashup account. I just downloaded my to my computer, but the choices are nice if you need access to the images as you travel.

Things I would like to see added or improved:

  • Offer swatches for picking colour. Having hex is nice, but I often like to just quickly choose a colour from swatches.
  • Show tool cursors. I could have done a better job of erasing if I could see the size of the cursor.
  • More fonts are needed.
  • Put the duplicate layer option on the layers window.
  • I could not upload from my Linux computer. This appears to be a common problem with Flash on Linux. Instead of wasting time I used an image hosting website such as QuickPictureHost.com and then I could simply open the image from a URL in Splashup. Comes in handy if you have problems uploading.

Overall a very nice tool for novices to use with plenty of options that are found in desktop graphic editing programs. For professionals Splashup could come in handy if they are caught in a pinch and need to get something done quickly. I will be adding their website to my bookmarks. Go and give it a try and let me know what you think?

Categories: tools